Fellow

Jennifer L. Geddes

Jennifer L. Geddes is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Her areas of research include evil and suffering, the Holocaust, ethics, critical theory, twentieth-century literature, and religion and culture.

Previously, she was the editor of The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, the Institute’s award-winning journal. Additionally, her work includes Evil after Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics (Routledge, 2001), and, with John K. Roth and Julius Simon, The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction in 2009. She was also the guest editor of a special issue of Literature and Theology on “Religion and the Tragic” (June 2005). The author of several articles, reviews, and interviews, Professor Geddes has had works published in numerous books and journals, including Literature and Theology, Journal of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Martyrdom and Resistance, The Hedgehog Review, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Culture, Conversations in Religion and Theology, Martyrdom and Resistance, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. She is currently working on a book entitled The Rhetorics of Evil, which explores the ways in which perpetrators, victims, witnesses, and scholars speak about evil and the ethics of responding to their texts.

Professor Geddes has been the Emilia Galla Struppa Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has given lectures and presentations at numerous universities and institutes, including the University of Iowa, the University of Connecticut, the University of Virginia, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the University of Copenhagen, Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Case Western Reserve Academy, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Princeton University.

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The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community at the University of Virginia committed to understanding contemporary cultural change and its individual and social consequences, training young scholars, and providing intellectual leadership in service to the public good.